The Mursday Effect Chapter 7: On the Road Again (Kind Of)

“Where the hell are we going?” Bridget yelled, the bumper of the truck now lost to the unforgiving asphalt.

“Where we’re going, we don’t need roads,” Darren said.

“Oh my God, shut up,” Bridget shot back. “We don’t have time for Back to the Future references.”

“I mean, technically he’s not wrong,” Retrograde said, hands clenching the steering wheel with white knuckles. “We are going in the harbor, so really, there aren’t roads. Good one, Darren.”

Bridget rolled her eyes as Darren flashed a satisfied grin.

“Do you have a charter or something? What kind of boat are we talking? At this point, you could tell me we’re using a piece of broken-off ceiling tile from Walsh to get all the way to Nova Scotia,” Bridget said.

“That’s not a terrible idea, but that’s not what we’re doing,” Retrograde said, a smirk creeping up his face.

“Oh thank God,” said George, who we didn’t forget about but wasn’t necessary to the narrative until now.

Normally this would be quite alarming, but everyone was pretty jaded at this point.

The quartet made it to the harbor, the New England Aquarium offering affordable fun for the whole family just steps away from historic Boston!

“Okay, here we go,” Retrograde said, making his way out to a dock.

“Hello, everyone! Welcome to our whale watching tour!” said a cheery guide dressed in all yellow.

“Yeah, we’re gonna have to ask you to get off the boat,” Retrograde said, the tiniest bit of authority in his voice.

“Okay, have a good day!” the teen said, dropping his air of care and concern. “Do what you want. I get paid minimum wage—”

“That’s great, see you later,” they all said hurriedly.

Having taken control of the boat, Retrograde fiddled with the standard navigation equipment that boats have. After a few minutes, the boat lurched forward, entering the choppy waters. After a half hour in the open waters, giant whales broke through the surface. It was beautiful.

“What an amazing and powerful representation of nature,” Darren said.

“I actually am not going to tell you to shut up this time,” Bridget said, hardly believing the words coming out of her mouth. “Because it’s nice, but also because we have to stay on this boat for hours.”

Retrograde sat at the helm, pushing buttons and doing more nautical things. He was like the old guy from Jaws.

After several hours of wandering around the boat, George came up to the deck to confer with his acquaintances.

“So, I was reading about Nova Scotia, and did you know that one of the guys from The Mamas and The Papas was from there?” he said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Bridget said, clearly missing some gaps of knowledge about folk rock in the 1960s.

“Well, he is,” George said. “Maybe we can go to a museum while we’re there.”

“Museums are just curations of what people want us to see and not what actually happened,” Darren said.

Suddenly, Retrograde yelled from his perch in the boat.

“Nova Scotia, here we come!” he shouted, pointing to a green area in front of them.

“Wow, that wasn’t so bad,” Bridget said. “It’s almost as if someone condensed our entire journey for the sake of maintaining a word count.”

The four hopped off the boat, tying it to a worn-down rope.

“That’s not our problem anymore,” Retrograde said as he walked away. The boat was already drifting back out and nearing a jetty.

A sign toward the shore had WELCOME TO NOVA SCOTIA written in Comic Sans. They had made it.

“Now what? Nova Scotia is probably huge!” Darren said.

“Compared with the rest of Canada, that’s pretty accurate. There’s almost 1 million people here, and it’s the second-most populated area in Canada,” George said. He was trying out a new thing, in which he tried to be helpful and knowledgeable to befriend others.

“Luckily for us, I have a codebreaker with me. It shouldn’t be long before we find the code that tells us our location,” Retrograde said, puffing up his chest with importance.

He took out what looked like a regular piece of paper and placed it over the welcome sign. It now read “WEL VA TIA.”

“Perfect!” he shouted. The others looked at him like he was crazy, which is saying something. “I know exactly where this is. On to Well Varied Tiaras.”

“Are you kidding me?” Bridget said. “You just took out a piece of paper and covered up some letters.”